Archive for the ‘Filmtheater’ Category

Naito Shinjuku was established in 1699 as a stage stop along a major thoroughfare heading out of Edo (old name of Tokyo). Dropping the “Naito,” the district started to be called Shinjuku in 1920, the same year that saw the Musashino-kan Shinjuku emerge on Shinjuku-dori Avenue, which was also home to the Shinjuku Mitsukoshi store. Local merchants opened a 600-seat movie theater in the three-story wooden structure with tiled façades. In 1928, Musashino-kan Shinjuku relocated to its current site, a new cinema with 1,115 seats housed in a three-story concrete building. During the silent movie era, Musei Tokugawa was active as a narrator here. Later, an air raid over Tokyo caused a fire to burn the entire interior of the theater, but the building survived and became a symbol of post-war recovery. Cinema offered entertainment to the populace, and Musashino-kan entered the golden age in an alliance of more than 20 theaters. But the movie-going population peaked in 1958 at 1.1 billion tickets, and rapidly dropped to 1/3 of that patronage by 1965. Amidst a declining industry, the decrepit Musashino-kan was demolished in 1966 and rebuilt. Still standing today, the building initially consisted of a retail and dining complex seven floors aboveground and three floors underground. The first movie theater in this new building had 500 seats on the seventh floor. In 1994, the Cinema Qualite mini-theater opened. The seventh floor was closed in 2002, and the third-floor theater operations changed banners from Cinema Qualite to Musashino-kan Shinjuku. For the improvements made most recently, however, aseismic reinforcement work on the entire building prompted the Musashino-kan Shinjuku on the third floor to undergo a complete renovation.

Located at First Street, HOME forms the cultural heart of one of the largest areas of development in Manchester city centre – a flagship building that acts as a catalyst for the surrounding area. As the base for the new organisation formed by the merger of Cornerhouse and The Library Theatre Company, HOME has been designed to allow for the commissioning, production and presentation of critically engaged and technically complex artistic projects, as well as the hosting of large scale cultural events. The overall budget for HOME was £25 million. Its striking exterior acts like beacon, while the welcoming public spaces and social areas within are designed to be inviting to all. HOME is like a second home, a cultural home: a place for making, meeting and socialising, alongside enjoying the very best in international contemporary visual art, theatre and film.

Our proposal for the future Palazzo del Cinema di Locarno aims to build a physical structure that will constitute the urban identity of the Locarno Film Festival. The project aims to bring together the infrastructural needs of the Locarno Film Festival, the pre-existent physical structure of the Palazzo Scolastico and the Piazza Remo Rossi to synthesise a structure which will capture the presence of the Film Festival within the city of Locarno. The Locarno Film Festival does not have yet a recognizable home within the city, and the complex of the Palazzo Scolastico and the Piazza Remo Rossi represents a great opportunity to encrust the Film Festival within an urban structure which has already deep affective relations to the Locarno citizens, and a significant presence in today’s cityscape. We hope that our project will be able to intensify both the presence of the Film Festival and the City of Locarno.

With more than 100-year-old history, the movie theater “Weltspiegel Cottbus” is one of the oldest cinema buildings of Germany and has stamped many childhood memories. A local enthusiast asked Studio Alexander Fehre to conceive a new overall concept for the former single-hall cinema and to give it a coherent interior design . Now two additional film halls with 80 places in each and a film bar belong in the annexe to the building. The historical hall with 520 places and a golden ceiling was utilized by a retractable platform also for events. By an exciting and universal interior design with references to the early film history an exciting merging of history and modern age succeeded.